Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, War Commentary

How Was Karl Rove…?

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…so clueless?

About four years ago, around the time when Democrats were heatedly charging that Bush had “lied” about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in order to build a case for war (after all, they argued, if the weapons had existed, why weren’t we able to find them after liberating Iraq?), I was having lunch with Dr. Laurie Mylroie, one of America’s leading students of terrorism in general, and Iraqi terrorism in particular. Laurie was beside herself with anger. Why wasn’t the Bush administration citing Gen. James Clapper, the Director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, who said that satellite imagery proved conclusively that shortly before the war’s outbreak, Iraq had transferred its weapons of mass destruction to Syria? Why wasn’t it quoting Gen. Georges Sada, deputy chief of Saddam’s air force, or Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s chief-of-staff, both of whom also claimed that Saddam’s weapons had been transferred to Syria? Why was it so tongue-tied, so unsure of itself, so unwilling to answer its critics? Didn’t anybody in the White House realize that if the Democrats’ charges went unanswered, they would fatally undermine the entire case for the war?

By this time, however, I had left the White House, so I had to tell Laurie the truth: Her revelations about Generals Clapper and Sada (though not Ya’alon) were news to me, and I had no idea why the White House wasn’t citing them.

I couldn’t figure it out either. I guess now we know the reason.

Thanks for Obama, Karl. Hope it turns out better than it is right now.

Political Commentary

A New Senate Majority Leader

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Seems pretty certain next year, one way or the other:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid attracts just 39% to 42% of the Nevada vote when matched against three Republican opponents. Two of his potential opponents now top the 50% level of support.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey in the state also shows that 62% of Nevada’s voters support repealing the recently passed health care law. That’s a bit higher than support for repeal nationally.

Fifty-seven percent (57%) in Nevada say the new law will be bad for the country.

The new numbers show Reid trailing ex-GOP Chairman Sue Lowden 54% to 39%. Only four percent (4%) would prefer some other candidate while two percent (2%) are not sure.

Either the Dems will replace him (Durbin?) or the Republicans will take over. You have to think that in an environment in which a majority leader loses as badly as these polls indicate, the latter is not at all unlikely.

And I wonder how different history would have been if Reid hadn’t squeaked by a few years ago, due to the Libertarian vote in Nevada?

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Backlash

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Are Californians on the verge of undoing the idiotic and disastrous energy law?

A coalition of businesses, financed largely by three Texas oil companies, is funding a ballot petition that would delay the law until California’s current unemployment rate is cut by more than half.

Leading Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has vowed she would suspend the law on her first day in office, which she would have the authority to do.

Even Schwarzenegger, who has staked his legacy on environmental issues, has begun urging air regulators to take a go-slow approach. But he has vowed to fight the ballot initiative.

The possibility that a state that has set the national agenda on environmental change for decades might shelve its highly publicized climate regulations could have ramifications beyond California’s borders. In Congress, lawmakers are struggling to craft a national climate bill that uses California’s as a template, but are facing headwinds of their own.

“This could very well be an effort to focus on California with the goal of delaying federal legislation,” said state Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, one of the law’s authors.

While it might have that great side effect, no, it’s an effort to focus on the insanity that has been coming out of Sacramento for years that’s been destroying the California economy and chasing productive individuals and businesses out of the state.

Even if you believe in AGW, this law never made any sense. It would have a negligible effect on global CO2 emissions, while putting the state economy, once larger than that of most countries, at a competitive disadvantage with not only all the other states, but much of the world. Texas has been laughing at us, and with great justification.

I can’t wait to see the end of the governator. The best that can be said about him at this point was the best that could be said of him at the time he was first elected — he wasn’t Gray Davis.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Second-Order Knowledge Problem

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…or why people like Henry Waxman, who think they can run the economy, are ignorant fools:

“What AT&T, Caterpillar, et al did was appropriate. It’s earnings season, and they offered guidance about , um, their earnings.”So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable.

They were also bad publicity for Obamacare, and they seem to have come as an unpleasant shock to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who immediately scheduled congressional hearings for April 21, demanding that the chief executive officers of AT&T, John Deere, and Caterpillar, among others, come and explain themselves.

Obamacare was supposed to provide unicorns and rainbows: How can it possibly be hurting companies and killing jobs? Surely there’s some sort of Republican conspiracy going on here!

More like a confederacy of dunces. Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can’t possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what’s more striking is that Waxman’s outraged reaction revealed that they don’t even understand their own area of responsibility – regulation — well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.

In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created. It’s like a second-order Knowledge Problem.

Possibly this is simply because Waxman and his colleagues are dumb, and God knows there’s plenty of evidence that Congress isn’t a repository of rocket scientists. But it’s just as likely that adding 30 or 40 IQ points to the average congressman wouldn’t make much difference.

Well, they might at least be smart enough to know what they don’t know. You know, when the president claimed that he’d read Hayek? I don’t believe him. Or if he did, he didn’t read for comprehension.

I also think that they outsmarted themselves, and it’s going to justly bite them in their collective keister this fall. Outsmarting them is no big feat of course. Except for them.

[Sunday night update]

Over at Cato, David Boaz has further thoughts. And they’re a lot more intelligent (as usual) than commenter “Jim”‘s.